India withdraw threat of tour boycott as tempers cool

India president says they will not go home if Harbhajan Singh’s three-match Test ban is upheld

AS A BATSMAN starting out in international cricket, Navjot Singh Sidhu was once described as "the strokeless wonder". By the time he retired, he had reinvented himself to become a punisher of bowlers. In his third avatar, as a television personality, Sidhu has never been shy of going for his shot, combining bombast with an earthy line in translated Punjabi witticisms. But even by those standards, his reaction to the Sydney Test controversies was bizarre.

Sidhu advocated that India's bowlers should kick the umpires as they approached the popping crease, perhaps inspired by fading memories of the shoulder-charge an irate Colin Croft gave Fred Goodall at Christchurch in 1980. That such a statement made Sidhu more of a hero in India said much for the popular state of mind, and hysteria whipped up by dime-a-dozen news channels. As Suresh Menon, a veteran journalist, wrote: "If this is what a Test